favourite title of the day

So, as I shelf read (making sure all the call numbers bounce along in the order they should), or arrange books at the shelving point ready to pack, or packing them, onto a shelving truck, my eyes run over the titles and now and then my eye is caught.

Today:  An Idiot's Fugitive Essays on Science*,  with a two page errata no less.

*Q 126.8.T78 1984.  And don't get any ideas the common denominator is any brighter thirty years on.

Today's count

February and last week it was ski pants and extra mitts.  Today the sky is blue with passing clouds and it is sweaters and fall jackets.  Scraped snow has dissolved into wet patches on the pavement, and more people are looking upward than usual.  It seems at least for today, those rodents didn't see their shadows on Saturday.

Yesterday's count

A great blue bowl above as I sat in the Bowl of the U of S in the afternoon sunshine, my great coat open, my eyes up and upon the delicate branches of the elms, turned white in the sunlight, and the sounds of the little people climbing the snow mountains at the far end of the Bowl and screaming their glee as they charged up and slid down.

C is for Santa smoking

While I admit I was off to nursery school the fall that Sesame Street hit the airwaves, I did in fact see some of it and my favourite character was not the bird, the green guy in the can, or the mysterious, long unseen, snuffy.  I was a Cookie Monster fan.  I grew up,  you can do the math from the launch of the show, in an era when kids were sent out to play and told to come home when the street lights came on. So you can imagine I was less than pleased to learn a few years back that Cookie was no longer allowed to eat cookies because they weren't good for him.  Bah.  I could use stronger language, but I was well brought up.

Then this week I discover that a woman has hacked out a few lines of "'Twas the night before Christmas", declared Santa to be a non-smoker, Photoshopped out his pipe, and published.  Why? because Santa, who according to the poem is in fact an elf, might be influencing small minds to rush out and take up smoking. Reminds me of the people I once babysat for who gave up Santa because when you rearranged the letters it spelled Satan.

Let's let the old elf have his pipe.  And if your kid wants to take up smoking, I suggest you look to other much more insidious influences.

C is for cookie, and that's good enough for me.

Returning Books

Rhacophorus nigropalmatus.  

And the cool things you can learn doing it.  I am off on secondment to the Natural Sciences library for five months.  Today I signed back in a book called Evolution*, 2nd ed/ Douglas J. Futuyma.[NatSci QH 366.2.F86 2009]  The cover caught my attention:  Bat Frog!, sailing, clearly, must be, off a tall building, in a single leap.  I mix my super heroes, but I care not.  Checking the inside information (oh that the intertube could be so clear about where things come from) and I find Bat Frog is actually a Wallace Flying frog.

*you are not required, by the freedom of religion attitudes in Canada to read this book.  Or like it, or think about it.  But the frog is darn cute.

21st C mechanic

It is true.  I have been under the hood of my mac.  I am moving up the Adobe ladder from CS to CS6 this coming month.  Yes, yes, I can hear you all screaming in horror, but really I had to wait until it was worth the change.  And now that I have unscrewed screws and pulled things out and put other things in, can I still call myself a Luddite?  Certainly.  I have changed the RAM.  Thanks to the guys on You Tube who made it look as easy as it is.  Now I just wait for the computer to actually prove it made a difference.  And wait.

One ping only

In the summer our library changed from Meebo (which had been successful and therefore sold and put to death) to LibraryH3lp for use as our online reference interface.  I miss Meebo's calming blue colours, LibraryH3lp is elblanco boring.  I miss the squishablity of the conversation windows that allowed me to put my conversations 'down' out of sight if the conversation has paused or stopped.  But what I missed most about Meebo was the comforting little 'pong' it made when letting me know someone was calling.  LibraryH3lp screeched.  It was painful.  It was frightening.  I had to turn my speaker way down.

Then one coffee break not too long ago I popped over to another branch and was talking to a co-worker who was doing online reference.  Screeeeech.  "Oh," she said, "my submarine is calling.  And there I was, suddenly on the bridge of the Red October, with Sean Connery asking me for 'One ping, one ping only.'  I have turned my speaker back up a bit.  And I am happy.